Our preliminary research suggests that a substantial proportion of subjects may be able to experience painful stimulation as non-painful by utilizing one of several cognitive strategies. Specifically, our prior research suggests that each of the following three types of cognitive instructions (instructions to think in a new way) may be effective in attenuating pain: (a) instructions to try (during the pain stimulation) to think continually of the stimulated body part as insensitive; (b) instructions to try continually to think about a pleasant situation; and (c) instructions to try to think of the sensations (produced by the pain stimulation) as sensations that have their own unique and interesting properties. This project will determine which of the cognitive strategies is most effective in elevating pain threshold and pain tolerance and in reducing psychophysiological responses to pain (blood pressure, skin conductance, heart rate, forehead muscle tension, and respiratory irregularities). The project will also evaluate the effects of an Experimenter Modeling Procedure; that is, half of the subjects will be exposed to pain stimulation after an experimenter demonstrates that he himself is able to block pain by purposively thinking in a new way. A series of personality variables will also be evaluated that may be related to pain responsiveness and to ability to block pain. The major experiments will use muscle ischemia as the pain stimulus and further experiments will be performed to determine the generalizability of the results to other kinds of pain such as ice-water pain, pressure pain, headache, and dental pain. Additional studies will be carried out to compare the effectiveness of our methods for reducing pain with the effects of audioanalgesia and other types of distraction.